Tag: notebooks

They are experienced. They are felt, intimated, intuited and interpreted.

Sometimes spoken through or about.

They become body.

They are lived – if only imaginatively – they are invented (always).

If inescapable or unavoidable, the only way to “pass” them – find them, become in relation to them (i.e. ‘go on’) – is to expel, express them… put them outside the body, psyche, person: MAKE them, forge them, create with them…

Stories are composed, inscribed, evoked, in order to ex-term-in-ate them. To live on – through and past – to survive what marks/marked the person who must process and be rid of them in order to… go on experiencing (live).

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Search those tales that traverse your body – its space, and over time.

Watch what arises again and again – a trope, a chorus, a theme, a complaint.

Though memory (creative narrative), perhaps it holds a not-forgotten, an almost-permanence. That which seems to stay with you, in you, may be of you – there’s story there. Don’t worry truth. Truth never worries. And no stories are about it. And constructs of “facts” – or, agreement of observations and perceptions – hardly tells as well. Stories – good, real stories – lie in differences.

Perhaps difference is kind of true.

Practice synesthesia with what you uncover / discover: hear what you see; taste the sounds; feel what you smell; look deeply at all you touch; be something like a being – an organism whose senses are always combined in the perceiving and experiencing. That you are is a thing unto itself, and can not be exhausted as long as.

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And so to write, to exscribe. In the beginning was… the true fact that you are, however doubting and unknowable. This too is experiencing. To be experiencing is to live. Prepositions and propositions notwithstanding.

It writes.

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And so it is said, a kind of exscription, a thinking-out-with. As breath surges sound or even whispers. To follow – not following – the forms of the objects (obstacles) – lungs and throat and palate, tongue and teeth and lips, not to mention faces and the movements of limbs and digits. The lineation of terms and letters, vocables and consonants – exscription-with, even air, atmosphere. And should the context change (and it is changing as you say, think, exscribe) – you write, you sound, you scribble, going-on-with…

Thus it is written.

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And so it becomes.

Stories are an history of mortality. Where it begins in first awareness that it ends. And so memories, so comparisons – lessness and mostness and the little by little of forgetting. How it’s made through its undoing, to the last. We story only as we die.

What is it that was said? You say?

Dusk becomes, and a sort of lost.

The first way in, being out.

Ex-scription.

The forth is all. Experiencing.

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Letting it air out. This seems important though many might advise that writing is a matter of devotion, dedication, discipline. Maybe it is? What have I written in way of stories? Much time is involved in the shaping of rivers’ courseways… and chance… and the continuous involvement of the with-out.

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Re-membering that the activity and activist (one doing the activity – actor/actress?) are entirely muddled in the ‘between’ that equals: “Here.” Forging or forcing ex-scription tends to falsify the act and turn it towards an in-scription of something – report or epitaph, confession, statement, fable, style, form. But storying and writing, like living and all activity, are between formless and formed – taking form, forming. We are not producing or conveying information, we are in formation through the activity of writing. To assume a stance, a stasis, a point-of-view or position or stake… authorial authority or control – is to leave the messiness of “here” and arbitrate a “there.” No longer the presence-between sayer-and-saying, thinker-and-language, writing-and-written, imagining-and-inventing, feeler-and-feeling, etc… but reduced to a repetition of forms, ideas, concepts – borrowed, received, believed, or accepted (“in-formed”). Composed verses composing; produced versus producing; almost a copyist versus a compositor (with com-posing and com-positing referring to making-with, viewing-with, creating-with complex multiplicities).

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Con-, com-, con-. With, with with- (these are the fields of ‘between’ where we are). Ever, always, only – between – experiencing through exscribing – this stays on, vibrating in the lettering, arcs and tones of the writing…as activity going-on. Experiencing. Energy. The forthness of creativity is its unknowable, indecipherable, inextricable withness. Perhaps.

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Authorial authority or control a sort of repetition of law, convention, acceded power, regime(n). An attempt to step aside from the stream of experiencing and treat the activity of writing (or exscribing) not as an activity of being – alongside thinking, loving, believing, feeling, working, etc., – but something mechanical, technical, somehow outside the confluence of being, the flow of experiencing. Feigning objectivity, knowledge, pre-cluded rather than preludic (decided-before versus approaching the play or dance or swim of activity in complexity). Told versus happening. Production versus process. Untrue, or less or more than actual. Mortality – dead letter – versus verbal occurring…as-is.

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To return to ending – the beginning of story – our limits, death, and finitude – that which forces us to forge – to attempt memories, notate change as loss or gain, seek patterns, learn, sing, exscribe, act… imagine… dream… craft and create – the knowing, the reality, that experiencing is not endless. Attend: it ends.

And so we story.

Exscribing…experiencing…what there is, while there is, along many modes of action. What is perceived as happening and runnels through the body, swirling currents of memory, the staining of refrains… and the activity of exscribing it – of moving it out-with-in-to relation of world as compositing – not copying, stating, reporting – but ever keeping in mind that the activity of writing is also a live, indeterminate, and infinitely complex way of being-with-world… we are hardly machines translating experience, or computers spitting out data… everything we do so long as we’re living, is living – alive and uncertain, conformation-with everything that surrounds and drowns us. Participation. Being.

Like this:

This Autumn has found very little time for sustained reading and writing, resulting therefore in meager offerings here. But I am finding jottings, thoughts, and notations in scattered journals that have somehow happened anyway. Please accept these little offerings as efforts to remain in dialogue…

Journal Entry

Why do we (at least some percentage of us) take such pleasure (or at least seem to relish) in dark and heavy sorrow, like longing? Grief, hopelessness – is it finitude and mortality that cause us to feel so at home in it? Our drowning womb, begun from a watery coffin?

The sweet, rebellious, anarchy of loving, passion, writing, painting, music…sex – whatever it is we do that works our death deeper in us, through ecstatic bursts that we respond to like life.

We all ways dying…from that first launch…that initial spark of convergence – our long elimination.

I really “mean” it when I say that I don’t know what I am writing, and that the REAL WHY is because I want to write, and am able, and that I honestly have no character, event, or idea in mind or body as I apply this mediatory marking instrument (ball-point-pen) between whatever-myself-is and this-blank-lined-paper.

I truly might be WASTING LIVING TIME.

OR…might be recording something useful…providing traces…leaving marks of process…like masturbation, cooking, politics, or work – HOW LIVING TIME IS “WASTED.”

Who knows? The scientists? Or neurobiologists? The philosophers or anthropologists? Historians? Pastors? Sociologists? CEOs? Artists? Who determines (evaluates and judges) what is “waste” from what is “significant”/”important”? Do humans? Does Time?

For what it’s worth, I have an ellipsis of minutes I am not (apparently) needed by children, pets, work, or world…and so I have taken up a writing tool and am drawing letters in collectives called words onto an empty section of a blank lined notebook.

Is this valuable? Don’t we wonder or ask this regarding every action and breath? From holding a child, to exercise; fixing plumbing to sleeping? Laundry. School. DOES THIS MATTER?!? And, if it might, to WHOM or WHAT…why?

I cannot imagine to whom it might matter that I am stumbling out sentences with nothing in mind other than WRITING, TO-BE-WRITING – excepting my insignificant eperiencing of “self” that WANTS TO BE WRITING – in any case. Therefore, I AM writing.

All those who seem to depend on me for their well-being, survival (or SENSE of same) also SEEM to be surviving and existing at relative comfort. Those who purchase (shamefully) my “LIFE.TIME” via employment – have proffered the day off as a normative weekend practice. For the time being, apparently NOTHING has immediate NEED of me, so I am left to determine what to do with “TIME.”

(my LIFE).

And because I overhear myself continuously complaining, desiring, wishing and bemoaning that I ‘never have time’ to write – I AM WRITING. Because.

As far as I can tell, I am writing nothing (of worth) because, as much as I desire to write, I actually don’t know WHAT to write, or for WHOM, or WHAT – and so i am just WRITING because. Serving no one, not even myself, yet perhaps. Perhaps, because the WANT or URGE “to write” as a writer…is NOT to WRITE SOMETHING (as far as I can surmise – albeit I also regularly wish I were writing something ‘great’ or ‘evental,’ etc…) but truly is simply to be IN THE ACT OF…WRITING, which I AM, and therefore I cannot know what good any of it does beyond being what I wish I were doing…becoming ACTUAL.

Wishes come true: I AM WRITING.

To no point of purpose but the fulfillment of desire: I AM DOING WHAT I WANT TO BE DOING: I AM WRITING. And it does feel good, and part of it (I think) feels good because I am unable to discover a path, direction, or ‘way’ for it to feel good FOR.

“His” body distinct in the way of all bodies, but matching no cultural icon. “His” mind above average – no matter. Mattered/matters little, just a human. Related to others in lieu of dependencies – that “human” is not a species that can live on its own. Therefore at least elements of an immediate surround are, well, ALWAYS, essential. Genuinely. Utterly. Whether air or land or water; people, chemicals, fuel. No human exists without others. Simply.

Therefore (i.e.) even the meaningless, unnoticeable Alias Harlequin could not survive without a surround. But might his “surround” survive without him? On this query, Alias’ presence (and present) is hung.

Yes, I said, yes, I would have explained what I felt I understood – about the “interstice” – what I felt I understood, I would have said.

As usual, the sighs, the diverted glances, the “I-don’t-knows.”

It’s alright. I’m pretty used to it, not that it no longer hurts, or squashes some part of me, but familiarity breeds…and it’s not contempt, at least for me. More like resolve, or, well, I don’t know.

Still I would have conversed about the “interstice.” Or its plural. No one can know what we’re talking about (in my opinion) – that’s why we talk (in my opinion). But I do like to look at her. And sometimes keep talking so that I can look at her longer.

Thus I would have explained – or attempted to – about the “interstice”… had I known, I tell her.

– “Known what, exactly?” she asked, “Really!?”

It’s ok. I’m pretty used to it – exasperation. It’s a sort of fatigue that settles on my interlocutors – my family, my friends, my lovers, my children – as I triple/quadruple/undendingly (exponentially?) second (meaningless term in this context) guess whatever it is (emotion, idea, memory, event) I attempt to convey.

I find I do not trust a thing as long as it might be questioned, and I have yet to discover something unquestionable. I like inventing titles though.

Fair enough, for the most part, I’m used to it. It’s “me” (as we are wont to say) – what I’m accustomed to. It doesn’t matter, or does in unquantifiable ways, but I keep at it. Anyway. I can’t help it. Well, some things do – vodka, sex, sleep – but only temporarily.

Things are only temporary.

That’s the sort of idea that keeps me alive. Temporarily. And second-(exponentially)-guessing.

She’s still there, here, though. Hence the interstice. I try to explain.

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As if “interstice” possessed a meaning, a definition, beyond the moment I activated or utilized it. As if it indicated. Meant – convergence-point (limitless above and below and around) of time and space conventions in a realm that felt (seemed) shared. Held in common. Nothing is “held,” or only temporarily. Changed with its containment. It seems. I don’t know. It’s certainly questionable – is it, ‘certainly’?

I don’t know. Which I thought, or think, is the entry to wisdom, but even that – I don’t know.

She’s still here. And I question – Who is it? Who is still here? And what for? How? Why?

And where is the vibrating “here”? And what for, how &/or why? I can wonder.

– “Wonder what, exactly?” she inquires.

I don’t know. I’m a human. An odd conundrum of pieces and parts that correspond or reciprocate in hold-together activities for a while…call it “organism,” there’s that, it would seem, but seem only, digging in it is hard to convince or confirm – a location, identity, consistency, avocation or being. It’s just so – apparently – temporarily.

Exasperation. You see? You dig? What I mean!? That’s what we’re after (together, I think) what it means. But what that means is uncertain, I think or surmise. We don’t know, it would seem, we’re uncertain.

Like this:

The poem linked above I pushed out last week… and marked it as “in progress” because for some reason it is one that the process of making, unmaking, forging and revising it (still feels “off” as published at above) has intrigued me. Here are the pages of notebook from which it hails, perhaps this is of interest, perhaps not, for better or worse…

We are working on an exhibition of new media for June at Wichita’s Fisch Haus, and have been battling over how to show process and creation when exhibiting technologically enabled and activated art. Perhaps that is why I’ve been more conscious of my own processes of making and revising. In any case, here is a little trail through the notebooks as a piece is coming to be…

In Progress….

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I am thankful for this loosening quiet,

your slackening ties of dusk.

Though often shackled by a fear of loss

in love, I may open toward a growing –

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possibilities of a learning, as in youth,

less about the being something

than, profoundly, just to be…

that which relaxes and allows

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like a cow caught up in weather,

or warm engagements with a child,

with the blossom, and make-believe.

Empowered when our symbol’d systems –

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confused by what is happening –

begin to sign that loss

(a form of death) ensures the safety

of our risks. That harm and haven

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are our home – the same as truth:

what’s loved is lost –

and thus we come to love.

Wisdom undoing opposites

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in terms of life.

I amt ridiculed by youth –

it’s how I know that many lessons

come unlearned,

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that “completeness is

a process of revision”

as they say,

and that our closures

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are what open

every day.

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The above was an editing of the following…which is why it’s still “In Progress…”